If you get a lot of mileage out of the Google Voice extension for Chrome and would like to turn it into a stand alone application, Lifehacker reader aberson shows us how.

Click on the image above for a closer look.

I like the Google Voice extension for Chrome, but I prefer to run it in a small standalone window outside the browser. Why do this? Since I run Gmail in "application mode", the GV extension button is not visible unless I open a real browser tab. It's cleaner to just open from the Quick Launch toolbar in XP. Windows 7 users could pin their shortcut to the taskbar.

I put mine in the XP quicklaunch bar, but you could also easily assign a hotkey to it or pin it to the Windows 7 taskbar.

Thanks for sharing the tip and creating the accompanying graphic aberson! If you've mucked through hacking your favorite application to do exactly what you want, head over to #tips and explain how you did it. You'll likely be saving countless fellow readers the same digging you had to go through to get things just perfect.